Singapore/Bangalore: Go-Jek, the Indonesian ride-hailing service backed by Sequoia Capital, KKR & Co., and Warburg Pincus, has acquired Bangalore-based health-care marketplace Pianta, its third acquisition in India.
The purchase is aimed at beefing up its engineering team in India, which is focused on product innovation and mining data to better serve Go-Jek’s customers in Indonesia, the Jakarta-based company said.
“We believe this acquisition will advance our mission to become the largest on-demand application of choice for all Indonesians,” Go-Jek founder and chief executive officer Nadiem Makarim wrote in an e-mailed statement on Tuesday.
Go-Jek, which introduced a mobile app in January 2015 to provide motorcycle rides on demand, raised more than $550 million in a round of funding in August to compete with Uber Technologies Inc. and Grab, two private car-hailing startups that’ve begun two-wheeled services on its home turf.
Founded by Harvard grad Makarim, Go-Jek has become one of the most popular ways to get around in Indonesia, especially in traffic-snarled cities like Jakarta. The company has branched out to other services, including food delivery, same-day delivery, grocery shopping and household cleaning. In April, it introduced an e-wallet service called Go-Pay to enable payments across its diverse services.
Pianta, which helps customers find and make appointments with health-care providers, was founded in 2015 by former executives of Indian startup unicorns Ola and Flipkart. Go-Jek has acquired two other Indian startups in the past to bolster its engineering ranks.
Grab, Go-Jek’s arch-rival in Indonesia, raised $750 million this month from investors including SoftBank Group Corp. Anthony Tan, Grab’s CEO, said the company will use the funds to expand the business in Indonesia, which he estimates is a $15 billion market.
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Source: Mint
